Vauxhall Football – The Big Pitch & Retro Restyle Facebook Apps

npower aren’t the only ones ramping up their football sponsorship efforts this week. The recent sponsor of all the home countries, Vauxhall, has started to make a push using its Facebook page.

The Facebook page has only been active for about a month now (first post on 12th July) and they have been pretty quiet with pushing it up to now. The 4,000+ fans can look forward to news from all the national teams of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland….thats a lot of content!

Vauxhalls new campaign has been in two parts. Firstly there is app called ‘Retro Restyle’ in which it allows you to add your face into various 70’s and 80’s iconic looks, if you can call the perm and tash an iconic style!

I did have one problem when having a play with this as it requires the newest version of Flash Player and if you are on a work PC where you cannot make downloads like this it is a bit of an issue.

The second part of the campaign was ‘The Big Pitch’ competition. They asked fans to tell the guys at Vauxhall why they deserve to win the big prize. The big prize is a two day ultimate ‘Wembley Experience’ – to train and play a game on the hallowed turf and also get tickets for an England match.

There are a number of ‘pitches’ by fans for why they should go on the page from over the last 3 weeks, you have a read of them here.

Richard Hennis, relationship marketing manager at Vauxhall’s parent company, General Motors, told new media age: “We want to engage with fans to show that Vauxhall knows what it means to be a national sports fan and that we understand football.”

(Just to add, another glitch I found was that when you try to go ‘back’ to the Vauxhall Football page (rather than click on the link and open another window) it automatically puts you back into the app.)

With this competition now closed and the winner being announced tomorrow one can only assume the tickets will be for next week’s England v Holland game. Has this been a successful launch of the new page? Well with 4,00 new fans in just under a month it has not done too badly and now has an audience before the start of the football season. We shall wait to see what they do next with the final qualifiers coming up soon and the the Euro’s.

Social Media is going to play a big part in the upcoming football season and with the European Championship and Olympics around the corner we’re going to see many more companies coming out with digital campaigns to activate their sponsorships.

About author

Dan McLaren launched Digital Sport (formerly UK Sports Network) back in January 2010 and has worked in the digisport industry with adidas, We Are Social, Copa90 and Pulse amongst others.
He's now a freelance social media guy living in the East Midlands and podcast host with the Digital Sport podcast on Audioboom, iTunes and Stitcher Radio.

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